The sufferings of men in prisons touch the note of horror. The national government is planning a monument for those who died in Andersonville. Gettysburg slew 26,000, Andersonville 32,000. The stockade included twenty-six acres, but three acres were marsh. Incredible as it may seem, there was no shelter, no beds, no cook-house, no hospital, no nothing. Just the cold rain in winter chilling men to death, just the pitiless glare of the August sun scorching them to death. There was no sanitation, and when it rained the little stream backed up the sewage, and after each shower men died by scores. Wirtz wrote Jefferson Davis that one-fifth of the meal was bran, and that he had no meat, no medicine, no clothing. Men burrowed in the ground, dug caves like rats, and not infrequently fifty bodies were carried out in a single day. Wirtz destroyed men faster than did General Lee. The men imprisoned in Andersonville urge that there were thousands of cords of wood just outside the stockade, miles upon miles of forests all about, that the prisoners could have built their own shanties and hospitals, and cookhouses. To which Wirtz's friends answer that he did not have weapons or Confederate soldiers enough to guard the prisoners on parole. While they also answer that the prisoners in Andersonville had as much food and the same kind as Lee's army was then enjoying. The plain fact is that the South was out of medicine, clothing and food, and was itself on the edge of starvation.
The wonderful thing is that these Union boys, 32,000 of them, who died at Andersonville, could at any moment have obtained release by taking the oath not to renew arms against the South. Some few did escape by digging under the stockade—but what perils they endured to escape from the enemy's country! They slept in leaves by day, and travelled by night. They were pursued by bloodhounds, lay in water and swamps, with only their lips above the filth until the peril had passed by. They wore rags, ate roots, shivered in the rains, sweltered in the heat, grew more emaciated, until more dead than alive they reached the Northern lines.
Now that it is all over, Confederate soldiers like General John B. Gordon have said on a hundred lecture platforms in Northern cities that, having done what he could for States' rights and to destroy the Union, he thanked God above all things else that he was not successful. In the spirit of Abraham Lincoln, that great Southern soldier wrote the last words of his life, in the hope that they would help cement the Union between the North and the South:—"The issues that divided the sections were born when the Republic was born, and were forever buried in an ocean of fraternal blood. We shall then see that, under God's providence, every sheet of flame from the blazing rifles of the contending armies, every whizzing shell that tore through the forests at Shiloh and Chancellorsville, every cannon shot that shook Chickamauga's hills or thundered around the heights of Gettysburg, and all the blood and the tears that were shed are yet to become contributions for the upbuilding of American manhood and for the future defense of American freedom. The Christian Church received its baptism of pentecostal power as it emerged from the shadows of Calvary, and went forth to its world-wide work with greater unity and a diviner purpose. So the Republic, rising from its baptism of blood with a national life more robust, a national union more complete, and a national influence ever widening, shall go forever forward in its benign mission to humanity."
Nor must we forget the work of nurses, the members of the Sanitary Commission, and the Christian Commission Movement. The events of the Russian-Japanese war show what is a wonderful progress of science. Japan sent along with her army experts on the water, the food, and the placing of tents, that made typhoid, cholera and the usual diseases impossible. Her surgeons used antiseptic methods, and gangrene was practically unknown in the Japanese hospitals. But the situation was different in 1861. Modern sanitation, surgery, antiseptic methods, chloroform and ether are comparatively recent discoveries. Such anesthetics as the surgeons had were poor in quality and insufficient in quantity. In the camps fever was prevalent. Smallpox, measles and lesser diseases became malignant and wrought terrible ravages. Tents became more dangerous than battle-fields. What the bullet began, the hospitals completed. More men died through disease than through leaden hail. But the noble army of physicians and nurses wrought wonders. Think of it! Twenty-six thousand men dead or dying on the field of Gettysburg!
Here is a page torn from the journal of one of the nurses there: "We begin the day with the wounded and sick by washing and freshening them. Then the surgeons and dressers make their rounds, open the wounds, apply the remedies and replace the bandages. This is the awful hour. I put my fingers in my ears this morning. When it is over we go back to the men and put the ward in order once more, remaking the beds and giving clean handkerchiefs with a little cologne or bay water upon them, so prized in the sickening atmosphere of wounds. Then we keep going round and round, wetting the bandages, going from cot to cot almost without stopping, giving medicine and brandy according to orders. I am astonished at the whole-souled and whole-bodied devotion of the surgeons. Men in every condition of horror, shattered and shrieking, are brought in on stretchers and dumped down anywhere." Men shattered in the thigh, and even cases of amputation were shovelled into berths without blanket, without thought or mercy. It could not have been otherwise. Other hundreds and thousands were out on the field of Gettysburg bleeding to death, and every minute was precious.
No page can ever describe the service of nurses, sisters of mercy, chaplains, brave men and kind women, who took train and went to the front upon news of the battle and remained there for weeks.
But while the soldier boys were striving unto blood for their convictions, what about the people at home who loved them? How did they carry their burdens and fulfill their task that was not less important? Fortunately, during the war, the North was blessed with four bountiful harvests that were rich enough, not only to support the people at home, and the soldiers at the front, but also to furnish an excess of food that could be sold abroad to obtain money with which to help support the war. It seemed as if the sun, the rain, and the soil had entered into a conspiracy to support the North and liberty. The largest crop of wheat and corn ever garnered before the war was in 1859. At that time, men thought the harvest would never be surpassed. But strangely enough, that bumper crop of 1859 was surpassed four times in succession during the Civil War. Meanwhile the herds of cattle and the flocks of sheep more than doubled during the conflict, and all of the land that was not yellow with grain became a rich pasture and meadow, covered with cattle, sheep and horses.
Even the losses of sugar and cotton usually purchased from the South were made up to the North. Threatened with the loss of the Southern sugar, sorghum cane was imported from China, and the people scarcely missed the Southern sugar. When the cotton failed, the unwonted increase of the flocks furnished wool for raiment. It stirs wonder to reflect that one poor crop of wheat and corn might have changed the issue, and defeated the North. Singularly enough also, the failure of crops in Europe not only offered a market for the unexpected Northern surplus, but yielded the highest price ever known, thus bringing in a golden river to enrich the Northern people. Jefferson Davis had said at the beginning of the war that "grass would soon be growing not simply in the streets of the villages of the North, but in Broadway and Wall Street." Davis believed that the withdrawal of every fourth man would make our problem of food and clothing impossible of solution. But at that moment the invention of the reaper enabled one harvester to do the work of ten men, and the new tools actually more than took the place of the Northern soldiers who were at the front.
Furthermore, the spirit of patriotism and self-sacrifice descended upon the Northern women. On the little farms where the farmer's wife was too poor to buy a reaper, the mother and the daughters went into the field to plough the corn and thrash the wheat and milk the cows. In many counties in Iowa and Kansas one-half of the men were at the front, and in harvest time it is said that there were more women working in the wheat and corn fields than men.
One other element fought for liberty and the North. A strange unrest fell upon Europe. Foreign peoples became discontented and began to migrate. In the summer of 1862 a vast multitude landed upon the shores in New York, at the very time when there was a scarcity of labour in the shops and factories. At the very hour when Lincoln was afraid that it might become impossible to clothe the army and equip it, the providence of God raised up foreigners who stepped into the place made vacant by the newly enlisted soldier; thereafter the North throughout the war actually increased in population, in wealth, in manufacturing interests. The Civil War ended with the North richer and more prosperous than when it began; while in 1861 slavery had impoverished the South, and war left the Confederacy crushed to the very earth, peeled and stripped, famished and utterly broken. For the South never yielded until she had cast in the last earthly possession, and knew that only life and breath were left.